The President of a newly independent
Kazakhstan-the ninth-largest country
in the world, by landmass-had a num-
ber of problems. Many of them were re-
lated to Russians, of whom he had inher-
ited more than six million, and to Russia,
with which he now shared the world's
longest border. The most immediate
problem with the Russians was that they
were leaving, which meant that a great
deal of education and expertise was being
lost. The other problem was that they
were staying: at its birth, Kazakhstan was
the only post-Soviet republic where the
titular nation was not in the majority.
Certain cities near the border were almost
entirely Russian; to this day, most media
in Kazakhstan are either from Russia or
in Russian. The process of Russification
had progressed further here than just
about anywhere else; nearly all Kazakhs
spoke Russian, whereas a large number
could not really use Kazakh in anything
more than a domestic context.
Marat, who grew up in Ust- Kameno-
gorsk, a very Russian city, said that he
spent his childhood in fistfights and his
teen -age years trying to get some space to
speak his native tongue. His father was
an actor in the Kazakh national theatre,
so Marat knew the language, but when
he spoke it in public, he recalled, a Rus-
sian would often remark, 'We can't un-
derstand what you're saying. Speak Rus-
sian." There were also more insidious
forms of Russification. As Marat and 1
were about to split a bottle of vodka, 1
asked him whether Kazakhs drank a lot.
He considered, then answered, "Russians
drink a lot." And Kazakhs had been liv-
ing with Russians for a long time.
N one of this was lost on Russian pol-
iticians and thinkers after the Soviet col-
lapse: the Duma deputy Vladimir Zhiri-
novsky, who was born in Almaty, called
for Kazakhstan to become Russià s "back
yard" again; Edward Limonov, the poet
turned politician, was arrested for plot-
ting to invade Northern Kazakhstan and
declare it an independent Russian repub-
lic. Even Solzhenitsyn, in his famous
1990 epistle on what Russia ought to do,
argued for annexing Northern Kazakh-
stan. By 1992, there were Russian irre-
dentist wars in Moldova and Georgia, an
Armenian irredentist war in Azerbaijan,
and an old-style clan-based civil war in
nearby Tajikistan. 1 t wasn't unreasonable
to assume that Kazakhstan would be
,h
"Would it botheryou if Riley turned out French?"
.
next. That it wasn't-that, in fact, Ka-
zakhstan eventually emerged as a viable
state, the most prosperous and seemingly
stable in Central Asia-is in no small
part a consequence ofN azarbayev' s tact,
intelligence, and unerring political in-
stincts. ("Anyone could have done what
he did!" the talented young novelist and
poet Erbol Zhumagulov told me. "Any
decent, reasonable, diplomatic, educated
person could have done it." But how
many such people were there at the top
of the Soviet hierarchy in 1991?) The
Russian political theorist Dmitry Fur-
man has praised N azarbayev' s subtlety:
where Boris Yeltsin had to shell his par-
liament into submission in 1993, Na-
zarbayev managed to get his parliament
to dissolve itself; where Yeltsin under-
went a gruelling and ruinous election
campaign in 1996, Nazarbayevappointed
his most dangerous rival, the poet Olzhas
Sulemeinov ("the Kazakh Yevtushenkò'),
to an ambassadorship in Rome.
N azarbayev' s handling of an often
drunk Yeltsin in those years was espe-
cially dexterous. As N azarbayev relates in
his memoirs, at a meeting in Moscow not
long after independence Yeltsin asked
why Nazarbayevwouldn't give Tengiz to
Russia. The Russians had discovered it,
and how was Kazakhstan going to get all
that oil out of the ground? "1 looked at
him and saw he wasn't kidding," Na-
zarbayev writes. A ticklish situation. He
played it cool. "1 said: 'Only if you give us
.
the Orenburg province. Orenburg used
to be the capital of Kazakhstan.' He said,
'Do you have any territorial claims on
Russia?' 1 said, 'Not really.' He laughed.
1 laughed." Another international crisis
averted. Not long afterward, N azarbayev
announced a multiyear, multibillion-
dollar contract with Chevron to develop
T engiz.
And then, after several seasons of
guile, backroom dealing, and craft, Na-
zarbayev made his move. He took his
government halfway across the country,
so that the Russians could forget, once
and for all, about Northern Kazakhstan.
Having done this for geopolitical rea-
sons, N azarbayev decided, apparently, to
make the most of it.
^ stana is being built according to a
.r\.. general plan devised by the famed
Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. His
design called for a city that proclaimed
the Age of Life, to replace the Age of the
Machine. What this appears to mean, in
practice, is that the machines get to have
a better life than the people: the Left
Bank is laid out on a grid, for ease of au-
tomotive navigation, and the access roads
to the several bridges across the Ishim
are convenient and unclogged. Fur-
thermore, for reasons of temperament
and vigilant policing, Astana drivers are
the best behaved of any I've seen in the
post-Soviet world. There is talk of a
light-rail system, but for the moment it's
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2011 101